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The family’s shock and grief quickly turned to anger when they discovered another funeral home had improperly taken the body.

St. Paul’s Hospital is apologizing for the mistake, admitting it wrongly released Haliburton’s body to First Memorial Funeral home in North Vancouver, which did not have documentation with the family’s required signature.

“We do have a detailed policy stating that there has to be appropriate paperwork signed by the family before releasing the body. We apologize to the family,” said Diane Kierstead, an official at St. Paul’s whose duties include the morgue.

“We’ve taken this quite seriously and have gone back and looked over our procedures and policies to ensure that in future we are going to adhere to these more closely.”

First Memorial would not speak to The Sun. And a spokeswoman from First Memorial’s parent company — U.S.-based funeral giant Service Corporation International — also refused to discuss details of this case.

The unsettling end to their mother’s wonderful life prompted Jim and Jackie Haliburton is speak publicly about the incident, hoping it might be a cautionary tale to other grieving families as they make funeral arrangements.

“Right from the beginning, I thought we had to do something about this,” Jackie said. “I thought likely it would be unethical if we didn’t talk about this publicly, because we don’t know if this is happening all the time.”

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Holly Haliburton was born in 1917. She worked as a school teacher before marrying her husband Jack — a Second World War pilot — and raising their two children in West Vancouver. She was a dynamic woman who loved to entertain and had many friends.

For 30 years, from age 60 to 90 Holly, who had a flair for fashion, worked alongside her daughter in Jackie’s unique clothing store, Angel, in Gastown.

In early February, she had a major heart attack, and spent two weeks in St. Paul’s surrounded by a group of extended family and friends. She maintained her sense of humour and love for the Vancouver Canucks until she died in her sleep on Feb. 17.

“We decided as a family we’d hold her hand 24 hours a day while she was in the hospital,” said Jim.

After taking a few days to grieve, Jim and Jackie Haliburton started to investigate where they would have their mother cremated.

The family had a business card from an organization it joined after their father Jack died in 1998. The 15-year-old card said to phone First Memorial Funeral Services to inquire about funerals.

The siblings visited the North Vancouver chapel on Feb. 26 to ask about the price of a cremation and were told it would be $2,400.

Jim said he “emphasized” that they would make no commitments, pass along no information or pay any fees that day.

“[I] had no intentions of completing a contract or signing any documents,” recalled Jim, who promised to get back to First Memorial within 48 hours.

The next morning, the siblings decided to hire A Basic Cremation, a family-owned company based in Coquitlam that charges $825 for a cremation.

The company’s owner, Preston Webb, faxed paperwork to the family to get their signatures and then phoned the morgue on Feb. 27 to arrange pick up.

“Preston called me back around 11:30 a.m. Wednesday and says, ‘St. Paul’s has no body,’” Jackie recalled.

“He says, ‘There’s a problem. Your mother was picked up by First Memorial with no authorization.’”

An outraged Jim contacted First Memorial. He said the manager promised to look into the matter and then phone Jackie, the oldest sibling, with an explanation.

“He says to me, ‘We won’t charge you for the transportation of the body,’” Jim recalled, still fuming.

Jackie is still waiting for the phone call from First Memorial.

First Memorial contacted A Basic Cremation, Jackie said, to indicate where to retrieve Holly’s body. The Haliburtons are thrilled with the services they received from Webb, the owner of A Basic Cremation. Webb declined to speak to The Sun about his competitor’s role in this story.

Jim has his own theories about why First Memorial took his mother’s body.

“I think it was just dollar and cents,” Jim said. “They made an arrogant assumption that they were going to get the business, but they had no authorization to move that body.”

First Memorial referred all questions to its parent company, multi-billion-dollar Service Corporation International (SCI) of Houston, Texas.

SCI spokeswoman Jessica McDunn, however, would answer no questions about this case “because we respect the privacy of the families that we serve.”

When it was pointed out to McDunn that the Haliburtons were never clients of SCI, she continued to insist that it would be inappropriate to explain why First Memorial improperly removed the body.

She said the company plans to speak to the family to answer questions, but couldn’t say why it hadn’t phoned the Haliburtons over the past two weeks.

McDunn acknowledged that a family needs to give permission before a body can be picked up, but refused to discuss general policies about morgue retrievals.

“I’m not going to share any further information,” she said.

McDunn said she was not aware of any other cases involving a SCI-owned funeral home taking a body from a morgue without permission.

St. Paul’s, on the other hand, was very open about what happened.

Kierstead said there was a breakdown in policy when the body was released to First Memorial without the family’s signature, and said the oversight may have occurred because of how frequently such operators are in the morgue.

“We work with these body retrieval services and funeral homes quite regularly. We see the same folks coming in,” she said. “This incident has forced us to go back and review and look at our procedures and ensure that they are going to be enforced.”

Kierstead added she is not aware of this type of incident happening before at St. Paul’s.

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Since being thrown into this situation two weeks ago, Jim Haliburton has started to research funeral homes. He became concerned about the concentration of ownership by SCI, which runs dozens of funeral homes and cemeteries across B.C., and thousands across North America.

The B.C. Funeral Association, formed by a group of funeral directors, produces a directory of its members’ funeral homes. In Vancouver, for example, five of the eight funeral homes in the directory are owned by SCI, but they all have different names so their affiliation is not obvious.

SCI also owns two of the three funeral homes listed in Burnaby, as well as two of the three homes listed in each of Abbotsford and Chilliwack.

The company owns the only funeral homes listed in West Vancouver, North Vancouver, Langley and Mission.

“The big thing is: nobody knows. The consumer has no choice,” Jim said. “This funeral world is so private, so mysterious.”

In the United States, SCI was slapped with a lawsuit in 2012, launched by families alleging the company mishandled burial plots and bodies.

It was not the first time the company has faced legal troubles. In 2003, it paid out $100 million to settle civil lawsuits after being accused of misplacing bodies, smashing vaults and overselling plots at graveyards in Florida.

The B.C. Funeral Association, whose stated goal is to “assist the funeral profession attain the highest possible standards of ethics,” does not take a position on concentration of ownership because many of the SCI-owned homes are members in good standing of the association, said president Ryan McLane.

He has never heard of another incident like the one that happened to Holly Haliburton in his 16 years in the business, and suggested it must have been caused by a misunderstanding.

“I can’t see anyone going out and doing this [on purpose]. It just wouldn’t happen,” McLane said. “The people in this association are good people.”

Nonetheless, Jim and Jackie Haliburton felt it was their duty to speak out about what happened to their mother, as a potential warning to others.

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